Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies

Walter Pater’s significance for the institutionalisation of English studies at British universities in the nineteenth century is often overlooked. Addressing the importance of his volume Appreciations (1889) in placing English literature in both a national and an international context, this book demonstrates the indebtedness of the English essay to the French tradition and brings together the classic, the Romantic, the English, and the European. With essays on drama, prose, and poetry, from Shakespeare and Browne to Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Pater’s contemporaries Rossetti and Morris, Appreciations exemplifies ideals of aesthetic criticism formulated in Pater’s first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Subjectivity pervades Pater’s essays on the English authors, while bringing out their exceptional qualities in a manner reaching far into twentieth-century criticism. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Charles Martindale is Professor of Latin Emeritus at the University of Bristol. He has published over a wide field, with particular emphasis on English–Classics literary relations, theoretical approaches to literature – in particular, reception theory – and Kantian aesthetics and the importance of ‘beauty’. He is the author of four books, and editor or co-editor of fourteen collections.

Lene Østermark-Johansen is Professor of English at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (2012) and of Walter Pater’s European Imagination (2022). She has edited Pater’s Imaginary Portraits for the Oxford Collected Works of Walter Pater (2019).

Elizabeth Prettejohn is Professor of History of Art at the University of York. Her recent research centres on relationships between the arts of past and present, explored in The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture (2012) and Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War (2017).